On May 30, 2008, Stacy Lewis rolled up to the first tee at the Old Course for a second time on the opening day of the 35th Curtis Cup. She’d teed off on the even holes in morning foursomes, so this was her first time teeing off on the iconic hole.
It was downwind that afternoon. Lewis pulled a fairway wood and felt the nerves pumping as they announced her name. The duff that followed was so bad, the divot started and ended before it even reached the tee. The stunned crowd clapped twice slowly, she recalled, not entirely sure what to do.
Her second shot was so far back that her local caddie, Fraser Riddler, suggested they lay up. She hit 7-iron down the fairway and had about 40 yards left over the Swilcan burn. She chunked it again, but the ball somehow managed to one-hop the burn, nestling 3 feet from the hole.
“These people that we’re playing gave me the 3-footer, and I’m like, did they not just watch this entire hole?” recalled Lewis with a laugh.
Lewis’ mom, Carol, went back over to the tee box after the session was over and took a photo of the only divot on the tee box. Lewis, of course, went on to become the first player in Curtis Cup history to go 5-0 that week at the Old Course, leading Team USA to victory. Five years later, she became only the second woman to win the British Open on the hallowed course.
“I absolutely fell in love with the place,” said Lewis, who played the Old Course 11 times during Curtis Cup week. “I fell in love with links golf.”
With the AIG Women’s British Open returning to the Old Course for a third time this week, Lewis is somewhat of a defending champion. Many of the loved ones who were with her in 2008 and 2013 have made the trip to St. Andrews, where they’ll try to recreate some of the magic. They’ve once again rented out The Dunvegan Hotel — a corner hangout once owned by Jack and Sheena Willoughby (a Texan and a Scot) — booked their tee times and brought coins for the wishing well.
“It’s just a match made in heaven, her winning there,” said husband Gerrod Chadwell. “That’s her favorite place.”
It was pouring rain the day Team USA first arrived in St. Andrews 16 years ago for the Curtis Cup’s first playing over the Old Course. The band of eight put on their rain gear and went for a walk, soaking up history.
After her first loop around the Old Course, Lewis told her father Dale that she might not break 90 if the weather stayed this bad.
Dad’s advice: Ask Fraser for help.
Lewis went out the next day eager to learn. When Riddler told her to miss the fairway on purpose and hit it in the high weeds, she complied. She took out putter when he suggested and took lines she never saw. He told her stories and made the place come alive.
During the trophy presentation, Riddler came over with his wife and infant son and said he’d move to the U.S. to caddie for Lewis the next year on the LPGA. Only Lewis didn’t have status at the time, and she thought it was too much to ask him to uproot his family with so much uncertainty.
Riddler went on to become the caddie manager at St. Andrews Links Trust before quitting his job to caddie full-time on the LPGA for Jenny Shin.
When Lewis returned to the Old Course in 2013, Riddler came out and walked a practice round with her and longtime caddie Travis Wilson, as did the caddie who worked for Alison Walshe at the Curtis Cup.
In 2008, the Lewis family stayed at the Dunvegan, and for 2013, they booked out the rooms above the bar and the loft across the street above the golf shop, just as winner Lorena Ochoa had done in 2007. Sheena draped the banisters with American flags to welcome Lewis, Walshe, Irene Cho and Brittany Lang. They ate dinner every night at the Dunvegan, and anyone who suggested otherwise was quickly dismissed. Lewis told the crew over at the loft that she’d pay for everything if she won that week.
Several weeks before Lewis went overseas, she worked with instructor Joe Hallett out at the Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Florida, on an overcast day in blowing rain. Ideal conditions to learn how to hit a controlled punch shot they called “the British Open 4-iron.” Her swing thought for the week was to get her left shoulder turned over her right toe.
While most tour players hate bundling up in bad weather, Lewis likes to play in rain gear because it keeps her swing from getting too long.
While she’s known now for her creativity, having won both the Scottish Open and British Open titles, she came into college with a one-dimensional short game. As she recovered from the spine surgery that required doctors to deflate a lung and move organs around in order to insert a steel rod, Lewis couldn’t even sit up on her own and had to learn how to walk again. In those early months in Fayetteville, Arkansas, she was limited in her recovery to work around the greens.
“We would stay ‘til almost turning on the headlights of the cars, forcing her to hit bump and runs,” said Arkansas coach Shauna Taylor. “It’s really cool watching her execute those shots, even though she gave me heck for trying to teach her.”
Inbee Park hogged the spotlight that week in 2013, and rightly so as the winner of the first three majors that season. Lewis had it in her mind that she wanted to be the spoiler.
Lewis opened with a 67 that week and was in the top 10 going into the weekend. On Saturday, play was suspended and scores were ultimately scrapped as the wind howled under sunny skies. Lewis, who never teed off that day, found herself alone on the range that afternoon.
The next day, the field played a continuous 36 holes, picking up lunch at the turn with no time to re-pair.
Lewis began the fourth round one stroke behind leader Morgan Pressel but wasn’t sure where she stood down the stretch, playing about an hour ahead of the last group with no leaderboards.
When she arrived on the 17th Road Hole for a second time that day, she knew the approach shot called for the low, flat shot she’d been hitting all week. What Lewis saw in her head – a well-struck 5-iron that flew low and was knocked down by wind into the slope and then chased up the hill – was executed to perfection.
She rolled in the 4-foot birdie putt and headed to the 18th tied with leader Na Yeon Choi, who was several holes behind. Sheena Willoughby began to cry.
After ripping a drive down into the Valley of Sin, she had a mere 40 yards to the hole. Wilson suggested she putt, but Lewis had confidence in a shot she’d practiced from that spot earlier in the week. Her approach rolled 25 feet past.
“I actually had that exact same putt in the Curtis Cup and I left it short,” she said. “I knew the read. I just had to make sure I hit it hard enough.”
She did.
After finishing birdie-birdie to close out a final-round 72, she waited to see if Na Yeon Choi could match her.
Four years later, Lewis took Chadwell to the Old Course and relived the shots that made her a major champion at the Old Course. The 5-iron Lewis hit into the Road Hole sits in their home office inside a Solheim Cup captain’s bag alongside a putter she once won a bunch with but now has a bit of a curve to it.
“I can see why she won,” said Chadwell. “She just probably beat a lot of people with her brains and her guts that week.”
During the 2017 British Open at Kingsbarns, the Lewis family once again stayed at the Dunvegan. They followed the same daily routine like clockwork. Breakfast with Jack in the morning, talking about sports and life. Beer and nachos with Jack in the evening. Chadwell and Dale like to order a BBQ chicken sandwich that’s not on the menu. Lewis gets the fish ‘n’ chips, and everyone has sticky toffee pudding.
In a way, Chadwell says, playing at the Old Course feels like playing the LPGA’s Toledo stop, Lewis’ hometown. Every year Lewis’ entire extended family has a nightly dinner at her aunt’s house, only there everyone devours a cookie cake rather than sticky toffee pudding.
This week in St. Andrews will be another week of story collecting. Like the time a group of Lewis’ crew went out around 11 p.m. one night and played down the 18th hole with a putter. Someone had to jump in the burn to retrieve mom’s ball.
Lewis watched from the road with her hoodie pulled up.
The 23-year-old who duffed that opening tee shot returns to the Old Course once more as a two-time major champion, a former No. 1, a two-time LPGA Player of the Year and a two-time Solheim Cup captain. As she plays her own game in St. Andrews, she’ll be keeping an eye on a short list of American players who could potentially round out her 12-player team.
Most importantly, she returns to the Old Course just over a decade later as mom to 5-year-old Chesnee.
“Opportunities like this are becoming less as I get older,” said Lewis, who knows this will likely be the last time she competes at the storied venue.
In 2008, the media gathered at the Road Hole thinking Amanda Blumenherst would post the winning point for Team USA. But it was Lewis who quietly closed out her match on the 16th to clinch it. Riddler turned to her and said, “You just won the Curtis Cup, and no one is watching.”
It seemed somewhat fitting then that the gritty underdog who spent much of her life hiding a back brace under her clothes would go unnoticed.
But those days are long gone.
As one of the best American players this century and the tour’s most prominent voice, Lewis returns to the Home of Golf with a unique responsibility and perspective in what’s become a youthful game.
“Everything she puts her hands on,” said Taylor, “she wants to make it great.”
A couple years ago, on his first trip to Scotland, Hallett was walking out of the famed Rusacks Hotel in St. Andrews and looked down at the bronze plaques on the new “walk of fame.” He was almost moved to tears when he got to Lewis’ name.
Hallett took a picture and sent it to Lewis, who’d yet to see her name in stone among the greats who’ve won a major at St. Andrews, including Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros and Tiger Woods.
It was a formal recognition of a place that’s long been etched in her heart.
